Salmon Seines · 296 days ago by Julie Loyd
At http://citizenscience.weebly.com
Mark your Calendar · 381 days ago by Julie Loyd
CONFERENCE: April 15 – 16 in Shelton, the State Salmon Recovery Funding Board is talking to salmon researchers. Russel Barsh, Audrey Thompson, and Anne Beaudreau will be there and invite your participation.
The state wants to know if it’s possible to scale up what we’ve done to 6 counties? How much would it cost?
Water Quality with Russel Barsh, Nov 8, 2008 · 485 days ago by Julie Loyd
If you click on underlined words, they will link to explanatory web pages, usually Wikipedia.
Present: Fred & Donna A, Isa D, Laurie G, Robin H, Claire H, Charlie & David & Julie L, Alison P, Betsy & Bob S, Gretchen & Stan W.
Russel Barsh gave the talk and Madrona Murphy acted as his lab assistant.
Purpose: To recruit and train people to monitor our surface and well water, hopefully monthly. They would look at contaminants that could affect the nearshore fish habitat. They would be responsible for maintaining the water testing equipment, which would be available for other projects. Training and further equipment will be available in the future.
Terminology: Ppm, ppb, or ppt are parts per million, billion, or trillion. Mg/L is milligrams per liter, µ/L is micrograms per Liter – equivalent to ppm and ppb. SJC is San Juan County. “We” is KWIAHT, Barsh and Murphy’s independent Lopez-based lab.
Overview: When we test for surface water contaminants, we concentrate on what’s easy to test for. Nitrates and phosphates, two nutrients pollutants in water, are fast and cheap to measure reliably. On the other hand, things like arsenic, widespread in the county, and toxic at extremely small quantities, are difficult to measure accurately.
We found pyrethroid pesticides at every level in the county, averaging 1 ppb, but testing requires more than desktop equipment. Generally pyrethroids are neurotoxins that interfere with the electrolytes that maintain nerve axons. Either it shuts the axon down or causes signal stutter. They’re derived from a waxy toxin that chrysanthemums, for instance, use to prevent insects from chewing on them, and are not soluble. Pyrethrin is also moderately toxic to mammals. It’s got a benzine ring and a tail, which chemical companies have tinkered with to make it more toxic to insects and less to mammals. However, it then is more toxic to fish and amphibians as well. Because they’re waxy they get stuck in silt, and average about a month of persistence. Some are stable in cool, dark, non-acid fresh water and and last for years. So, they have extreme acute toxicity but don’t last.
In SJC, we use about 150 pesticides, half have pyrethrins. Most of our farmers are organic in this county. The major users are the three pest control companies, bug spray, and garden products (which decreasing numbers of people use). Silt washes off gardens and gets into the food chain through detritivores, or when water is turbid and fish run silt through their gills.
We want people to switch to products that are less toxic to fish. Allethrin is a trillion times less toxic to fish than bifenthrin. We’re trying to convince the County to measure pyrethroids on a regular basis. We want to develop a list of all the compounds and rank them by their effect. Gretchen W has a table of all the active ingredients in products sold in the County, with toxicity to honeybees, fish, and mammals.
Stan: If one sprays one’s house for termites, what can be done to reduce toxicity around the house?
Russel: Light and warmth. It lasts about a month.
Pollutants We Can Test
1. Nutrients:
Nitrates: NO3. All living things use nitrogen to build proteins. Nitrates are the form in which nitrogen is taken up and excreted. 1 – 20 ppm in our waters is expected.
Failed septic systems and concentrations of livestock pump nitrates into the water. In enclosed areas such as the upper end of Eastsound, where the water can sit for days without moving, you get algal blooms. Everything gets green and slimy. Eventually, because of reduced oxygen, habitat is compromised and animals die or leave.
Phosphates: PO4. Phosphates have been historically boosted by people using fertilizers and laundry soaps until about 25 years ago.
At very high levels of nitrates or phosphates, the water starts to taste funny, but they’re not really toxic to humans. They change ecological processes and are a signal for problems with our handling of human and animal waste.
Nitrates and Phosphates are easy to measure with tabletop equipment.
2. Pyrethrins are hard to measure, though they’re highly toxic. (See above).
3. Surfactants (soap) are a class of chemicals that we use a lot, because they are designed to allow oil and water to combine: Candy, plastics, motor oil, gasoline, soap, shampoo, laundry soap, dish soap. In SJC, we find about 1 ppm on average. That’s a threshold level of concern. The EPA’s recommended drinking water standard is 1/2 ppm. That matters for fish and amphibians, because it disrupts their membranes. It can suffocate fish, cause disease and fungal infections in amphibians, and pop fish eggs. For insects, surfactants are also effective at the ppm level, though there’s less information on insects.
Soaps are sometimes recommended as an alternative to pesticides. A surfactant spray plugs the speracles, the tiny pinholes in the insects’ armor through which they breathe. At lower levels, it probably also disrupts membrane function and oxygen exchange across membranes. Phosphates are builders that enhance surfactants. Once phosphates were removed, the surfactant strength in soaps were increased.
Fred: In terms of environmental impact, won’t impacting insects be more important than impacting fish?
Russel: Yes, everything eats insects. The four standard animals used to test a new product are the rat (a stand-in for humans), ...
Stan: Only Republicans! (General laughter, then a brief moment of remorse.)
Russel: The rat, the rainbow trout, a world-wide standard that is closely related to salmon, the honeybee, and daphnia magna, the water flea. Much more important than daphnea would be aquatic insect larvae, which everything eats.
The word “surfactants” represents whole families of chemicals. There are non-ionics, cationics, and weird ones with charges distributed around the molecules. Sodium dodecyl sulfate, SDS, or Sodium Lauryl Sulfate is extremely persistent in the environment, used in toothpaste and soaps. We report surfactant presences as equivalences to SDS.
MBAS method is used to test for anionic surfactants, which are about half of the surfactants Americans use. (Non-ionics are used by hospitals and various industrial de-greasers). MBAS sometimes cross-reacts with heavy nitrate loads. It’s generally considered by chemists that the MBAS tendency to overreact with other chemicals offsets the fact that it doesn’t react at all with a lot of the surfactants that are out there. It forms a brilliant blue that sticks to the sample.
In the environment, surfactants have a varied lifespan.
5. Phenol is a benzene ring with an OH hat on it, one of the simplest of the petroleum derivatives. It ends up in all bulk products made from petroleum; gasoline, asphalt. Because it’s easy to measure it’s an indicator for the larger family of petroleum derivatives in the environment. The test creates a chromophore that locks onto the molecule. The new chemical bonds that form changes the color of the indicator, and you can then determine the concentration of the target. It will always underestimate by about 100-fold how much is out there.
In water, we’ve tested levels around 10 ppm, and in sediment levels of about 100 – 200 ppm, which is a level of concern. If you mix phenol with water it produces carbolic acid, a disinfectant. Toxic to people at about a grain of salt’s worth. In the environment it lasts a few months, so it’s not a big accumulative signal. If you find this in your well water, you have a big problem.
6. Arsenic, Cadmium, and other heavy metals: Very toxic. In SJC, we have a metal-rich environment since this area just started eroding about 10 million years ago. There’s a lot of Manganese, Iron, Nickel, Chromium, and Silver in the water, enough to make measuring Cadmium by desktop means unreliable – too many chances of a false positive. Heavy metals are serious enough in terms of federal regulations that we might be able to get the County to screen for it.
We are in the plume direction of the Tacoma arsenic smelter, now closed. We still see lead, arsenic, etc coming in from fossil-fuel burning plants here and in Asia – a continuous rain of airborne particles. Arsenic was applied as a pesticide in our orcharding days as well.
Mammals are more tolerant of copper and zinc than marine organisms. It’s used in anti-fouling paint and electronic equipment. Copper is really easy to reliably test for using a colorimetric test, though neither Cu and Pb (lead) are tested for by all SJC water systems.
Fred: Copper Sulfate is the recommended treatment for anthracnose in apples. It’s approved for organic certification.
Russel: Organic certification has to do with effects on people. BT kills butterflies. Rotenone kills fish. The good news is that if you apply it in an orchard that’s not draining into the water, it will bind with the humus in the garden rather than drain. Plants and mosses absorb copper. We don’t see a lot of Cu in surface waters in SJC. The assumption is that the Cu and Zn found in marine waters comes from boats.
Water hardness comes from Calcium carbonate CaCO3 and Magnesium carbonate MgCO3. You can’t do anything about it, it’s there geologically. It’s an easy chromometric test. Our tester could only go up to 200 ppm, and everywhere in the county we found more than that, how much more isn’t known. It’s not in a form our body can absorb. We absorb Ca and Mg from meats, fruits, and vegetables.
The rotten egg smell in some water systems is caused by Iron and Sulfur interacting with an infection of Fe and S reducing bacteria. It won’t hurt you but it makes the water taste bad. SJC is iron-rich but there’s not that much sulfur.
7. Salt. We have salt water intrusion in many places in SJC. Limestone rich rocks are responsible not only for water hardness but also contain salt. It won’t kill you, but it doesn’t take much to make the water unpalatable. In your testing, look for Cl, chloride, the dissolved chloride ion. It could come from ocean-bottom bedrock or seawater intrusion. You can tell which by looking at it over time. If it’s saltwater intrusion, it’ll get worse. If it’s from bedrock and there’s recharge, it will improve.
Hands-OnWorkshop
This tabletop system is used in industry because it’s cheap and fast.
Sampling: Test several times over the year to see seasonal changes and to see whether readings include background from the reagents. Every once in a while, do the test on ultra-pure water. In winter, contaminant levels should go down because more water is added to the well.
In chemistry you’re always saying, “if it’s really there.” You always want to rest and retest.
Collection Bottles: A laboratory grade plastic bottle helps keep chemicals in the samples from sticking to the sides of the bottles. To collect a sample, fill it and dump it out twice and use the third fill. Store in a cool, dark place and test within 48 hours. Surface water should be filtered to remove particles and bacteria which might change water chemistry.
Tricorder: It’s a spectrophotometer which shoots three wavelengths of light across a sample, based on the substance you’re testing for. It will do all the calculations for you. You test an unreacted sample (the “blank”) first, then the reacted sample. Readouts will be to two decimal places, in ppm.
Cuvette: A little container used by the spectrophotometer made from optically clear glass that’s machined to have even wall thickness. Fingerprints can contaminate it, so use chem-wipes, pick the cuvette up by the lid or above the shoulder, and keep the inside uncontaminated.
There is a whole language of mixing reagents; swirl, flick, invert, and shake. In these procedures we invert most of the time.
Lab Timer: It has a minute, an hour, and a stop button. Pushing the two top buttons simultaneously zeros it. A big button resets it.
Cleanup: Clean up with hyper-clean HCl. 30% HCl can burn flesh but ours is at 15%. It separates things that have bonded to the cuvette glass and burns them off. Pour about 1/4 inch in the cuvette, screw the lid on, slosh it around, pour into the drain, then do the same, twice, with ultra-pure water. Store upside-down on Kimwipes until dry.
The reactive liquid is toxic waste and is poured into a canning jar with absorbent material (a starch polymer or vermiculite).
Procedure:
Try to run your test exactly the same way every time, so that your errors will be systematic. Test and re-test.
Russel lined up five cuvettes on a piece of paper and labeled the paper: blank, phosphates (PO3), surfactants (LAS), phenols (ph), Copper (Cu), Chloride (Cl).
Russel operated the meter, Madrona wore latex gloves and prepared the samples.
We started with a sample from LG’s 42 foot well, which had particles at the bottom. Madrona put a sterile syringe filter into her syringe, then drew out 60 ml.
She squirted 10cc (a cc and a ml are the same) into a cuvette, marked by the line at the shoulder. This is the blank.
On the tricorder, there are buttons for on, off, exit (to go back in the procedure), up and down scrolling, and enter. To start, press enter. Go to testing, use the scroll bar to find the folder called Sequence 1.
Inside that folder, start with PO4, phosphates, low level. It asks “scan the blank.”. Wipe the cuvette, put it into the well, cover it, press enter. Flash indicates “blank done.” Now scan the sample.
To test for phosphates, mix 10 ml sample with 1 ml acid reagent. Use a 1 ml dropper to extract the reagent. Don’t stick the dropper into the sample tube to prevent contamination. Then, add .1 gm of phosphate reducing agent, which comes with a little spoon. Cap and shake (this may take a long time) until all reagents dissolve, then set the laboratory timer for 5 minutes. Some of the reactions are held together with weak atomic bonds and fall apart in 3 or 4 minutes.
You can reset by reshooting the blank any time; press exit.
When the timer went off, the PO4 cuvette was immediately inserted. The reading was .16 ppm. After 15 seconds or so, he shot it again and again got .16, so it didn’t change. You’d see 1 – 10 ppm in a goose pond. At 1 ppm it starts to be of concern.
The copper test is very fast. Scroll down to Cu for copper,. Enter. When asked, shoot the blank.
Add 5 drops of the copper mix to the next sample cuvette, invert it two or three times, then scan immediately. In our case, it was .01 ppm, which is at the low end of what it can measure, so perhaps it is not even there at all.
The next test was for surfactants, the MBAS test or LES test. One of the reagents, the indicator, is dissolved in toluene, an organic, carcinogenic solvent. Don’t sniff it, don’t spill it. It’s volatile. In case of a spill, it’s not water soluble so absorb it with soap or better, alcohol. The thing that will get it off you fastest is alcohol.
Madrona mixed in a pH buffer (sodium bicarbonate), then ultra-pure salt. She added 2 ml of toluene/methelyne blue solution, shook it for about a minute, then let it sit for five minutes. We end up with an aqueous layer (the sample) and an blue oil or organic layer, (the toluene), floating on top. The salt pushed the methylene blue out of the toluene into the water. Russel flicked the side a few times during the wait to help the solution unstick from the sides of the glass.
After 5 minutes the sample went in the spectrometer and read 1.2 ppm.
To test for phenols, first shoot a blank. Then, add a buffer, then a reagent and an activator to the sample.
The indicator looks yellow and turns green and purple if there’s more than 1 ppm. Sediment samples from bay bottoms turns to india ink in seconds. The sample was inverted a few times and then scanned. The reading was 00, no measurable phenols, below the LOD – limit of device. Our LOD is around .1
To test for chlorides, break up the tablet with a pill crusher. Add the sample, invert two times (it will be cloudy) wait 2 minutes, shoot the blank and then shoot the sample. This is the argentometric method, Silver Nitrate. Nitrogen and Chlorine compete for the affection of the silver. The silver looks around for any chloride that’s in there and will switch ionic partners, which changes the wavelength of absorption in the solution.
This one came out to 19.7 ppm, which would be salt, MgCl (from limestone), or KCl. Anything over about 5 ppm is an indication that something is there, either geological or saltwater intrusion.
August 5, 2008 Molly Jacob's Invertebrate Class · 582 days ago by Julie Loyd
Some of the plankton counters went to Friday Harbor Labs to talk to Molly’s Invertebrate students about plankton counting. We brought our June 18, 2008 sample with us and the 16 students, each with their own microscope, stared and counted. The majority of plankton were barnacle nauplii (larval barnacles), but since it is summer, there were many categories of plankton in the sample.
Afterwards, Molly asked us what we were trying to do with our baseline study. Do we have any questions that can be answered with a project that uses our skills and that we would enjoy doing?
We all recognized that that was a significant question, and will think about it.
July 5, 2008 Beach Monitoring with Jim Johannesen · 612 days ago by Julie Loyd
Beach geologist Jim Johannsen visited us to show us how to measure beaches.
While geologists have studied beaches in general, there usually isn’t funding to study a single beach long-term. We study local beaches not only for our own interest but to contribute to basic geologic knowledge. In an era of sea level and climate changes, there is rich opportunity for new research. Data which people collect from our island should be sent to Julie who will archive them at the WCL and send them on to Jim.
It is not precisely known how beaches change seasonally, or how they will change due to climate change. Because of the ice caps and Greenland melting, there will be more water in the oceans, and because warm water takes up more space, the level will rise even further. NOAA has been tracking a gradual rise through 1960, more recently it gets steeper. In our area, sea level will be l to 5 feet higher by 2100. Our water temperature has a 20 to 30 year cycle, as well as the El/La Nino cycle which is shorter. The long-term trend is warming. Around here, the El Nino warm water smashes into Peru and Ecuador, works its way up the coast into the Strait of Georgia. In the 97/98 El Nino winter, the Sound had 1.1 foot of water higher than average. With more storms, that was a big erosion year.
There are about six things that would be useful to measure, which could be done in 5 minutes up to half a day. You don’t learn much from single measurements. With good protocols, a group of people could do a useful long term study of a beach.
The geometry of local shores: The bluffs have vegetation at top, then glacial till, then sand. Starting from the toe of the bluff, there is the high beach with vegetation and drift logs, then a sand slope, cobbles, and the waterline.
Some ways to monitor a shore starting with the easiest:
1. Photo Points. Find a fixed point to stand at that you can locate again and again over the years. Using the highest resolution possible, take pictures at low tide in four directions: alongshore, bluffwards, towards the water. Ideally, you’d do this monthly and right after storms, but two to four times a year would be good, too. Expect to see the most erosion around March, and to see a high beach around August. Date and label photos. Julie has a pin drive and can collect photos electronically.
2. Beach Profiles: Using two poles and a rope, measure the fall of the beach at 3 meter intervals. Record the beach composition and any eelgrass or critters at the appropriate spot. Barry, Bill T, Laurie G, Julie L, and others can train you. We measured Glenn’s beach, and including explaining and setup, it took 30 minutes total. We walked from a fir tree out to low tide.
3. Quadrats: A quadrat is a wood or PVC square 1/2 meter to the side), which you set at the minus one foot mark (and, if you like, also at the minus three foot mark). Depending on how detailed you want to get, you either take a picture of the quadrat, count the creatures in it by family, or identify them all the way to species. You can find four very nice identification guides here
4. Beach Change:
a. Wave height: Set a marked stake in the water or measure a rock or piling beforehand. During storms, measure the troughs and crests of waves.
b. Longshore current speed: Lots of beach change is driven by suspended fine sand pushed by waves. Pace out 50 meters, throw something like a crab buoy or driftwood in the water and time how long it takes to go that 50 meters. Measure on calm and stormy days, at differing tides. You can get tide predictions here. I have yet to figure out how to get to the NOAA current predictions.
c. gravel transport rate: spray paint the gravel green or pink, measure motion and direction with GPS or a tape measure. Scrub, dry, prime, and paint the rock. Do it right. Things might move down or up the beach depending on size or time of season. After a few months you might find 20% of them. In Britain they created aluminum pebbles with fish tags in them, each pebble has a unique electronic signal.
d. Drift log mobility: Tag individual logs and follow them around.
e. Vegetative change: From a fixed point, map the edges.
f. Sediment scour: The idea is to see how much the sand level changes over a season. Do this at the +8.5 and at the +5 tide mark. Digging down a foot or two below where you think the sand level has been at its lowest (March?), bury a measured column of crushed bricks or shells, pinpointing the spot exactly by triangulating from known spots. As the sand accumulates above the column, you can dig down to the column and measure how much has accumulated.
Questions:
Bill: Do we get material from the Fraser River?
Jim: On an island where you’re separated by deep channels, the source of beach sediment is what you see on the bluffs and that’s it. River contributions are clay and silt which ends up in deep water. The beach sand that vanishes in winter gets pulled offshore and then pushed back up maybe 300 meters down the beach in summer. You get bluff erosion from Hammond, moving towards Sandy Point; it’s a one-way conveyor. If everybody bulkheaded the bluffs by Hammond, you’d see beach erosion march down the beach. In the future, more and more houses will have to be moved back.
Glen: What vegetation would be good to hold a cliff once it’s slid? Scotch broom will colonize but it’s an invasive.
Jim; Dune grass, if there’s room at the toe. Firs and cedars, snowberry, willow, ocean spray, salal, Oregon-grape; plants with strong roots, can retard erosion. A 20 foot native plant buffer at the top of the bluff would be good. The County encourages that. You can limb the firs to keep the view window.
May 16, 2008 Lingcod with Anne Beaudreau · 660 days ago by Julie Loyd
Anne is sampling Lingcod stomachs at the marine reserve and Brown Island, both near Friday Harbor Labs.
She, her squid specialist friend Mary, and I slathered up with sunscreen and went out in a little whaler. We had three fishing rods with big hooks and squiggly black rubber lures. The idea was to let the line down until it touched bottom, then “jig” it up and down until a cod leapt for it. I spent the day wrestling with my rod, but Mary kept pulling fish up; some Puget Sound Rock Cod, a greenling, and Lingcod. She caught the largest one of the season, over three feet, because she’d hooked a one-footer which then was almost immediately caught by the bigger one.
Anne had two coolers, one with anesthesia-filled water and another for recovery. She put the fresh-caught fish into anesthesia. When they passed out, she weighed and measured them. She had a nifty cod cradle made out of foam core, where she put them on their back. Lingcod lavage is done by holding the sphincter between their throat and their stomach open with a forceps, then feeding a large plastic tube in through which seawater is pumped. Most of the fish had empty stomachs. One had a 5” partially digested fish, the other had the freshly caught Lingcod mentioned above. Afterwards, Anne clipped a bit of fin off for DNA analysis, took some blood from the caudal vein, and tagged them with a wire tag in the fleshy part of the back. After some time in the recovery cooler, the fish were returned to the same spot where they’d been caught.
Data will be used to decide whether marine sanctuaries work, as well as to determine what Lingcod eat at various times of year and at various sizes. There are other components of the study too.
May 14, 2008 Beach Seine with Kurt Fresh · 661 days ago by Julie Loyd
Kurt intended to sample all around our island and on the other side of Presidents’ Channel as well, but there wasn’t enough time. They ended up sampling Cowlitz, Henderson’s, and in front of the Appel’s, and possibly one more beach. I was gone during the middle of the day.
Russel Barsh and Audrey, a fish biologist for Wild Fish, came too.
At Cowlitz, the net pulled up oodles of chum, shiner perch, and striped perch. There were some fish deaths at the beginning, but by the end of the day, people’s technique had improved considerably and there was practically no mortality. Audrey pickled some of the chum stomachs for later inspection by our plankton team.
Here are the things that, in my opinion, helped make the day successful:
1. We chose beaches that were easily accessible by road as well as water.
2. We had equipment lists to help us decide what to bring.
3. The net pulling crews understood who to listen to and followed instructions to pull in the net, concentrate the fish, and pour them into a holding bucket with a minimum of fuss and cross-purposes. Other people stayed clear.
4. Audrey worked VERY quickly when handling juvenile chinook. She measured the fish and clipped the fin in one smooth motion, held them up for Kurt to wand them with a magnetic sensor to see if they’d been tagged, and then had the tube up their throat, water squirted in, and the stomach contents in a filter. She had them in the recovery tank in under a minute. I think it might help future citizen scientist lavage teams to watch a video of how she did it and to perform some dissections on fish to see where the stomach is and how big it is.
Feb 3, 2008, Camas with Madrona Murphy · 661 days ago by Julie Loyd
Madrona Murphy is a Lopez-based botanist with KWIAHT. Her talk on camas was given to a large group of islanders last winter. Along with Russel Barsh’s talk on wooly dogs (see below), Madrona’s talk was designed to support the thesis that the local Indians were shepherds (dogs) and farmers (camas) as well as fishermen (the usual view of them).
The way we talk about the people who lived here for generations, the Coast Salish, is oriented to salmon. That’s not the whole picture.
Our area is the Salish Sea. We are in the Gulf of Georgia, the Puget Sound is lower. Most of the Indian art that we see here is not from the Salish Sea, but from the Northwest Coast, the Tlingit and Haidas, who were primarily fishermen. We can find cultural parallels in Europe for both societies.
The Haidas were based on territorial personalities with their castles and clan. They operated like medieval European princes who went to war to amass wealth, and who were seen by the majority of people when they collected slaves or taxes. When the Coast Salish talk about Haidas or northern tribes, they think of a boatload of raiders coming to take slaves. They all have a story of some family member stolen by the northerners as recently as the 1800’s, not unlike what the Europeans perpetrated on west Africa. Blockhouses in this area were built by Europeans to repel the Tlingit. The early whites and their Coast Salish neighbors ran to the blockhouses when they heard of a raid coming. When a chief died, they built big masoleums.
The Coast Salish were more like Northern European traditional cultures. Their knowledge and physical wealth was distributed over hundreds of miles. Their legacy wasn’t inherited by any one person, but by the spread-out family. Coast Salish dead were put in trees to get rid of the flesh, then buried under rock cairns.
The Coast Salish were agricultural people. Their economy was largely centered on food from the soil. Farming and towns versus the castles and raiding of the northern tribes. Anthropologists have a hard time calling locals “agricultural.” Agora means field, cultellus means knife, hoe, plow in Latin. Anthropologists have erroneously called local activity horticulture, derived from hortus, meaning garden in Latin.
Worldwide, one kind of farming system is based on the grains: maize, wheat, rye, rice. The other world farming system is based on the storage systems of plants: potatoes, manioc, yams, camas. This kind of farming involves what we now call permaculture. You could say the Coast Salish practiced perennial polyculture.
In preindustrial Europe, food and clothes came from fish, farms, and flocks (sheep). In the Coast Salish world, they came from fish, farms, and flocks (wooly dogs).
Fishing: The Coast Salish set reefnets, which catch sockeye. You can dry a lot of fish in summer. They also ate shellfish, available fresh in winter; native oysters, butterclams, and steamers (see Ryan Drum for an account of butterclam gardens at the zero-tide line). The location of village sites was oriented to fresh water, shellfish, and farming sites.
Farming camas and other plants: Camas can grow quite large. The petals of Camassia quamash wilt in all directions, those of Camassia leichtlinii curled up into a ball. Our island has both species.
Does evidence of farming translate into persistent morphological diversity, in the same way that Europeans selected for different beans or peas? The most visible difference between camas populations in San Juan County is the color; they can be white (even those that aren’t death camas) through dark blue.
In May 2007, Madrona and Russel collected camas from 26 sites on 18 islands. They found quamash here and on San Juan Island in the two national parks, and leichtlinii everywhere. You would expect random diversity to show more similarities between closer together plants, and diversity caused by people to show differences according to clan.
They’re looking for sites from the rim. March’s Point at the refineries, the Coast Salish name for March Point at the refineries means “camas.” They grew potatoes there, and later they put on the refinery and cattle farm and couldn’t find Camas any more. At Jones Island, the deer had eaten it all. Gorgeous death camas, though.
Chuck: When I was first on Waldron, Skipjack was solid camas.
Madrona: We didn’t get permission to go there. Small rocky islands are ideal for camas. For one, deer don’t go there, for another, perhaps due to storms, the soil is several feet of gorgeous soil, like at Blind Island near Shaw. The other very large patch was off of Satellite Island. This island has uniformly larger Camas than any of the bigger islands, probably due to the absence of deer. Speiden doesn’t appear to have any.
We use a flower color chart to pinpoint the possible colors, measure, weigh, and tag the plants. If you collect by hand, you can tell the soil. Most of the sites didn’t have significant charcoal, so they weren’t relic gardens. The best sites would have been turned into orchards or farms. So, what we are seeing probably were around the edges of better sites. Also, the Coast Salish switched to potatoes early on. Rich soil might have become potato farms instead of Camas. The potatoes were brought out here by the first Spanish who got here, and were traded by Indians.
Russel: In the 1820’s, the earliest records from Hudson’s Bay Company describe Indians selling potatoes to the Europeans. They were being grown by Indians who had very little contact with the whites.
Steve: I use charcoal in farming.
Russel: We look for homogeneous soil, where the entire A layer of the soil is rich in charcoal, like that in slash and burn cultures in the South Pacific. That’s called anthropogenic, human-altered.
Madrona: We don’t see chunks, but ash and particulate charcoal, from lighter burns. We don’t have stories of people bringing in charcoal, but there are stories of people bringing in seaweed, fish waste, and rotting wood. They used digging sticks.
Caleb Kennerly, 1860, with the British Boundary Commission, described Lopez: “A point where the rocks suddenly hung their perpendicular wall over a valley, apparently of large extent, covered mostly with small bushes and ferns with a few large firs.” It would have been bracken fern, the roots were definitely an attractive food source. The Dept of Agriculture considers camas as a wetland plant, as does AgCan, while here it can grow in our driest areas.
Coast Salish plant use on Lopez: A slide with sites marked.
Madrona showed maps with longhouse sites marked.Some have been excavatd but it’s difficult to get ahold of the data. Landowners have been collecting artifacts since the 1880’s, so there’s an enormous private collection of stone bowls, figurative art, etc.
Reefnet sites are close but not at the same place as the houses. People could have walked or canoed quickly to their reefnet sites. Not as current thought has it: they weren’t “gone for the summer,” they could have walked.
Current camas meadows are marked, they are also within walking distance of the houses.
We can’t talk about tribal boundaries because there was so much family interrelationship. The map has arrows going to everywhere. Tribal names are artifacts of Federal naming in the 1880’s, but really everyone’s related to everyone. Some relationships go between Saanish, Semiahmoo, and Lummi. Another between Lummi, Samish, and Lopex. Another from San Juan, Sookes, Songhees. For Stuart and our island, most of the family connections go to Vancouver, on the other side of the international border.
We don’t know much about this island. There was probably a longhouse at the TNC swamp. Very little is left of it due to erosion. In 1951, there was enough evidence to suggest that there was a house inside the area that’s now the wetland lagoon area. When Andrea Wiser and Barsh did a study of artifact scatters, they were concentrated around the present day wetland around Cowlitz, suggesting that looking under the pond would be interesting.
Fishery Point was named Wch-chun, meaning “fishing pole.” Longline, rock fishing, and halibut was famous here. Records up to the 1950’s talk about how great the deepwater fishing was around here.
As far as we can tell, the people most intensively using this island were closely related to the people who had reefnets at Pt Doughty and at West Point. Those people also were not settled there, their house was at Eastsound, a big community.
The one site where we found unmistakeable old Coast Salish garden soils, was out by Bob W’s. It is very similar to the bluff edge garden sites seen at Iceberg point, probably much eroded into the sea. There is also lots of Camas on Disney. We know they tended to put their gardens close to water and transport. Top of Disney wouldn’t make a lot of sense. But, people also transplanted regularly. You have to collect bulbs somewhere. The stories say people would go to Disney, where the camas was tough, and bring them elsewhere to start gardens.
Russel: We don’t have evidence that they were farming oak. Why was Disney burned so frequently? Carson S. produced excellent evidence.
We know Coast Salish set fires in woodland areas to increase hunting areas. We have lots of historical records of big deer drives on Disney. I guess that Disney was being burned frequently to maintain it as good deer and elk browse.
Madrona: On Vancouver, they argue that the oaks are there because the people kept the area clear for Camas. People did harvest acorns. I heard the other day that camas only grows in oak litter, which is a distortion; it grows on Lopez where we have no oaks. In the San Juans, there’s no evidence that Indians collected acorns, so why do we have them? There’s some evidence that oaks colonized after logging. All of the oaks from Cheyenne Smith’s study established as seedlings in the 1880’s after extensive clearing in the Gulf Islands.
Another camas point here is the B’s point on Mail Bay.
Gretchen: How does it spread if it wasn’t farmed?
Madrone: The seeds are relatively heavy, I don’t know what eats them. It’s possible that they transplanted them to areas that they didn’t farm, just to make the landscape more human friendly. It would be nice to see which species grow where on Waldron. One, leichtlinii, is more likely to have been gardened because it produces more biomass, but there are some garden sites that only have quamash.
Gretchen: Could people have planted near shellfish areas, just for convenience?
Camas Species: Leichtlinii only occurs from BC to N california. Quamash extends out into Idaho & Montana, northern Utah. Two species kusikii, howlii, common as ornamental, are endemic to Oregon. An eastern species, skiloidies, occurs in the Mississippi Valley corridor, where the people were maize farmers. They ate camas, and farmed corn and beans. Eastern camas doesn’t cross, territory doesn’t overlap. Angusta grows in two southern states, probably rarest. Camas is not related to anything else. Closest relative is chloragalla, and then after that, agave, restricted to North America. Lilies and fritillarias are more widely distributed, and maybe people extended their technology to camas. The center of diversity for Camasia genus is in Oregon.
Russel: Lena Daniels grew up at the fish camp at Pt. Doughty. When Wayne Suttles and I were walking around Pt. Doughty with her, she told us where things were in 1908-1910. At one point, she said, they’d be up to their knees in salmon heads and tails, they’d be so sick of salmon, that they’d get in their boat and go over to Mail Bay, drop a line in the water and have rockfish for lunch. That area, they considered to be the same place.
Names: Madrona: They viewed land as it surrounds water. The bays and high points have names, the islands don’t. They looked for what you see from the water. Viewing things from the land, you get valley names instead.
Russel: The Saanich families on Vancouver have remembered more names for this island than any Samish groups. They’re at Saanich and Nanaimo now. Not Lummi, as the Lummis have always claimed.
L’kungenung is the language spoken by Gulf and San Juan Island peoples. On Orcas, the Big House was still there until 1913, when it had morphed into a row of frame houses, across from Indian Island. The Slough formed a canoe channel through Orcas. They’d spend winter in Eastsound, fishing for shellfish. In early summer, they’d go up the slough and out to Pt Doughty, the major reefnet site, last owned by Boston Tom. A Deer Harbor house was described by early settlers, but there aren’t records. The Westsound house left an enormous shell midden, but no records. There was another one in south Eastsound.
The name for Mt. Constitution might be the name for the San Juans, Swelech. The name of the natural slough is s’chall (JL’s approximations).
Camas behavior: Madrona: What did the gardens look like? Not only does camas grow big. It reproduces by splitting. Wild camas doesn’t, but garden plants do it like mad. What triggers it? Do the voles on Iceberg Pt. make that happen? It grows shallow in a garden, but arm-deep in wild locations. It wedges under rocks. It’s only practical to garden it. In the wild, it reproduces by seed, a one-year-old plant in my garden is the size of a grain of rice. If I plant Jan 1, it comes up in March. Planted in fall, it comes up in Jan. It won’t bloom for four years or so.
From stories, Camas from camas balds and islands were transplanted to bluffs and meadows with or without camas already there. In spring, they hoed and weeded. They targeted grass, and, of course, death camas. Suttles asked a lady about grass in camas gardens, and she got offended. Of course they took care of their gardens! Some harvesting occurred in spring. Summer dormancy (during fishing). Fall harvesting, not just when it was in flower, but probably mostly in fall, when yampah also was harvested. You don’t harvest yearly, but every three years. Harvesting in spring makes your hands blue, which was described. After harvest, you burn, when the yampah is done blooming.
People historically refer to harvesting camas, yampah, chocolate and tiger lily, Brodiaeas, Alliums (onions), bracken fern, berries.
Camas: A camas meal would be reconstituted dry camas with dried fish and dry smoked clams. The camas would be the sweet part of that soup. Roasted in a pit barbecue you’d get camas fudge, like date sugar; sweet with an odd flavor, soft, creamy, starchy fudgy thing. Almost pure fructose. Camas stores energy as inulin, indigestible to us, so you have to cook it for a long time to break it down into fructose. Same as Jerusalem artichoke.
Yampah: Yampah, Perideridia gairdneri, looks like Queen Anne’s lace, flower doesn’t have a cup, no leaves unless in the shade when it’s blooming. Roots are double with swellings on the end while it’s blooming. They taste like resiny sweet carrots. They’re the most easy to imagine people just eating. The biggest ones were the size of a pinkie. Leaves are very thin, little points as thin as pine needles, long and soft and green.
Chocolate lily: bulbs have a hat-shaped central bulb. Instead of having scales like tiger lilies, chocolate lily bulbs have what look like grains of rice, with the potential to make new plants. As soon as they are disturbed, all the scales send up shoots. Chocolate lily was considered to be the less attractive choice as opposed to tiger lily. Neither are palatable to our current tastes, though the Coast Salish liked them very much.
Brodiaeas: are a lily relative, look like a lawn with green leaves, die back, then they bloom in July or August especially after a fire. Townsend’s voles spread brodaeia. The way you can tell a vole garden from a Coast Salish garden is the presence of rocks. It’s native. The meadow vole, complained of by NW gardeners, is not native, not in San Juans. Raptors like eating voles. Voles make runways through the meadows, and raptors hang over them waiting. You’ll see flashes.
Onions: are dormant during summer. Hooker’s onion. Nodding onion is green year-round with a deep root.
Bracken fern: likes fire.
Trailing blackberry, black caps: like disturbance.
They removed death camas, grasses, trees, shrubs, snowberry, rose, conifers.
Death camas: looks like a hyacinth. Has scales on its leaves. If you rub them, they’re like sandpaper. They’re greeny creamy white. Heads more compact and full. Bulbs look identical to the edible camas. You find places where death and edible camas are physically adjacent but separate, possibly because they were tossed out by weeders. It does cause livestock poisoning.
Laurie: It takes effect very quickly. I shat and vomited everything, then I hallucinated, then lay on the couch for days. My insides felt like they’d been in a wrestling match. If I hadn’t vomited, I’d have died. I couldn’t hold my head up, had to be led down the trail.
Madrona: I recommend against harvesting camas unless you’ve personally been involved in weeding the plot and are sure. People marked their fields with ditches, rocks, sticks.
Photo of microburns, When surface temp got over 800 C, 2 cm down it was about 60 C, at 5 cm down was 30 C. So, it might sterilize the surface, but have little effect on bulbs. Bracken came up 3 weeks later.
Camas was replaced by potatoes. The word for camas has to do with digging. The word for potatoes is “dig it up a lot.” Potatoes have a much faster cycle.
Nutritionally, camas produces inulin, fructose. Potatoes are starchy, producing glucose. Potatoes probably were a bit upsetting to the system, part of the reason diabetes might be more prevalent among tribes which ate camas, Snoqualmies are looking into that. Quote from Vancouver: The potato is almost universally cultivated. Potatoes and dried salmon are the staples, camas was considered delicacy. 1857, W.C. Grant.
Russel: The US and Canadian Gov’t tried to convert natives to farmers, which was difficult in the Midwest. Out here, the potatoes were here before the Government was.
Estuarine gardens: Gardens on tidal edges would include Potentilla (silverweed, cinquefoil, has stolons and rhizomes) Springbank clover, our only native clover, which used to be abundant. The last collection was 1915 on Stuart. Still exists on one of the USFW islands. They’re starchy, unusual here. Potentilla tastes terrible. Do we know how to cook it anymore? Or did they select them to be tasty and we don’t have anything representing the cultivated plant. It was described as tasting like sweet potato, but moderns say no. Douglas Dura’s the primary researcher on this, thinks estuarine gardens were cultivated in this area.
April 26, 2008: Seabird Ecology and Conservation in Washington · 682 days ago by Julie Loyd
Present: 19 adults, 6 children.
Peter Hodum is Assistant Professor at University of Puget Sound and a director at Oikonos. His current projects are on Protection and Tatoosh islands with Rhinocerous Auklets and Tufted Puffins. He also works on long-term conservation on Juan Fernandez Island 400 miles off the coast of Chile.
Nathalie Hamel is a PhD candidate at University of Washington who grew up in Quebec. She’s studying murre bycatch in local fisheries and is involved with the projects on Protection and Tatoosh.
Seabird life history: Seabirds tend to be long-lived, some of them live 60 – 70 years, or possibly longer. It takes several years for them to begin breeding, and then they have low egg laying rates. Cormorants lay the largest clutches at 5, but most seabirds lay 1 to 2. Most can’t replace lost eggs. Most seabirds are colonial nesters such as gulls, auklets, and Pigeon Guillemots. The range of habitat is from nearshore (murre) to oceanic (albatross).
Overall, seabirds are opportunistic feeders. They might eat plankton, squid, fish. Some specialize, some are generalist. Some dive, some are surface feeders. Many are highly migratory, even those with “challenged flight styles.” Rhinocerous auklets move from here to California, for example.
Seabirds are found in all of the world’s oceans. Some species, like the gulls, can be terrestrial as well as marine. Many are marine animals. Murres, puffins, Pigeon guillemots, and the tubenoses (albatross, petrel, shearwaters) may spend years at sea and only come to shore when they are old enough to breed. On land, they’re often clumsy.
Shapes and forms are diverse, a function of their ecology. Pigeon guillemots are divers, so they look stubby. Albatrosses soar, with long wings. Bills also are differentiated.
Seabirds as indicators: They tend to be top-level predators, thus integrating the trophic levels below them. That is, they depend on all the prey that lies below on the trophic chain. If they eat salmon, they are dependent on what salmon are dependent on.
They are responsive to change and tend to breed in good years. Because they’re long-lived, they will abandon breeding attempts in undesirable years or places. A white-crowned sparrow will put all of its efforts into its one breeding attempt, because chances are it won’t live to breed again, but a seabird likely won’t. The costs of breeding and tending a nest are great.
Seabirds can be used to track changes in the marine environment. Their response to change depends on their life-history; they might be adaptive, able to buffer changes, or they may be more specialized.
How we study Seabirds: On-colony is the usual, since doing anything at sea used to be very costly. There, one can look at population size, survival, reproduction, provisioning (diet). At sea, one can look at foraging and migration. Technology has changed enough so that this is more possible: VHF transmitters, satellite transmitters, Geolocation tags on JFPE (Juan Fernandez). Using geolocation tags, they’ve tracked Sooty shearwaters. The birds cover the entire Pacific basin, 20,000 to 25,000 miles, in about six months. They’re called the “endless summer” birds.
In southern latitudes, there are incredible bursts of productivity in the summer, then it drops precipitously. The Sooty shearwaters go north, rocket through the equatorial areas, and then hang out in the northern summers. The Pink-footed shearwaters might winter off Peru. Others went from Ecuador to the southern tip of Baja in about four days, spending their summer off the North American Pacific Coast. How did that evolve? Nobody knows.
Forces Shaping Seabird Populations: Bottom up: driven by oceanography and food availability. Top down: predation, human impacts. Other forces: Introduced species on islands, for seabirds, is the greatest problem. Gulls, terns, cormorants evolved in the presence of terrestrial predators, but most nesting seabirds don’t recognize predators (rats, mice, cats, pigs, foxes). Habitat destruction – the word “pristine” no longer has meaning anywhere. Plastics are serious. Albatrosses in Hawaii bring their babies plastic to eat, although there are no humans within 1,000 miles or more. Oil contamination. Fisheries: thousands of birds attend fishing boats, waiting for the discards. They can be caught in nets, hooks, or get caught in lines. For certain types of fisheries and certain types of seabirds, it can be devastating. For albatrosses, fisheries are the greatest cause of their decline world-wide.
Seabirds in Washington: We have eighteen breeding species in summer, and more than a hundred non-breeders that overwinter or migrate. That diversity declines after the migratory season.
NOAA, DFW, research Universities, and many others oversee this area, but seabirds are astoundingly poorly studied in the state of Washington. There is no overarching vision. Nathalie and Peter will have to start with first principles at an agency meeting in a week, “why do we want to study seabirds?”
Why, then? Seabirds tell us a lot. They know where food should be (that’s why they compete with fisheries). There’s an incredible biomass of seabirds in the Sound. The most common bird in Washington are Sooty Shearwaters which breed in New Zealand. We usually get upwelling on the outer coast where they summer. In the Puget Sound there’s freshwater input, creating productivity. NOAA maps show chlorophyll, which is almost always tied to zooplankton and fish productivity. (Some seabirds specialize in low productivity zones, though).
Local Birds: Fork-tailed storm-petrels, Leach’s storm-petrels, Cassin’s auklet, Rhinoceros auklet, Common murre, Pigeon guillemot, Tufted puffins, Marbled murrelets, Pelagic cormorants, Doble-crested cormorants, Brandt’s cormorants, Glaucous-winged western gulls, et al. (the more we learn about gulls, the more humble we get. Glaucous-winged hybridize with Western gulls here. Westerns are found in CA, Glaucous-winged further north).
The WA coast has USFWS National Wildlife Refuges: Smith, Protection Islands, Flattery Rocks, Quillayute Needles, Copalis. Not even researchers can step on the refuges out on the coast.
Local Seabirds: Black-footed albatross, Laysan albatross, Short-tailed albatross (thought-to have been extinct), sooty shearwater, Short-tailed shearwater, etc.
Winter marine birds flood the outer coast and Puget Sound: Rhinoceros auklets, Common murres, Pigeon guillemots, Pelagic cormorants, Loons, Grebes, Scoters, Ducks, Gulls.
Oddly, it’s less diverse here in summer because only 18 species breed here.
Questions:
Smell? A lot of diving birds have sealed nares and can’t smell.
Echolocation? No evidence. Common murres can dive to a record of 150 – 175 meters, or more commonly, 70 meters, where there is “no” light.
Navigation? Petrels, shearwaters, and albatrosses leave the burrow/island as a fledgeling. They tend to come back to the same island when they are 7, 8, or 9 years old, after that many years out at sea. They may use magnetic or celestial orientation. Not well understood.
Are there nations that are responsible for more fisheries deaths? The good thing, is that fisheries deaths are a solvable technical issue. Ed Melvin at U of W at Washington Sea Grant, has had remarkable success in Alaska, WA, and South America. Long line fishing does hook a lot of birds, and is getting a lot of attention; US, Japanese, Taiwanese, especially in the North Pacific. In Southern oceans are other fleets with other gear. A lot of times it happens in open waters with no oversight. Our fisheries operate on the honor system.
Upwellings? They happen along the edges of continents, typically the eastern boundary of an ocean basin; here and in Southern Africa (benguela current), not as pronounced on western boundaries like the East Coast or Japan. When living matter sinks down to the cold, dense layer, they move with undersea currents. As the currents move, they get deflected by undersea features. At the coasts, winds pull water offshore, which pulls the undersea currents up, which feed the biomass.
Puget Sound seabird status (Nathalie): The Puget Sound is beautiful with clear water, but it is not healthy. Recent headlines show decline of salmon in the area, herring, marine life, wildlife, unexplained seabird deaths
Read the State of the Sound 2007 by the Puget Sound Action Team on that subject. Their report card for seabirds is at the danger zone. Populations have declined by 1/4 to 1/2: 90% Western Grebe, 57% Scoter and other scoter declines are well documented. Others: Mallards, etc. Some have increased: Harlequin Ducks, Double-crested Cormorants. And finally, there are species for which information conflicts: Pigeon Guilemonts, Double-crested Cormorants, Rhinocerous Auklets (decreased on colonies, increased on water). Pigeon Guillemots. They count birds at colonies and out on the water. Marble Murrelets seem stable, though they declined since the ’70’s.
Why do some birds decline and others increase? We don’t know. Where is it happening? – Puget Sound? Breeding grounds? During migration?
Western Grebes spend a few months in northern BC and Alaska, breeding, and possibly that’s where the decline is happening. Prey availablity, distribution and abundance? There are about six Bald eagle nests on this island. They are important predators on colonies, and can cause significant disturbance.
Loss of habitat, coastal disturbance – how do you quantify that?
Contaminants – affect eggshell thickness and overall health.
Fishing gear and fishing practices. Ghost nets that have sunk to the bottom hold a lot of bones; they are still fishing even though they are not being operated. There is also bycatch, in this area by gillnets.
Case study
Common Murres Uria aalga on Tatoosh Island: Murres have declined drastically in the early 1980’s in Washington. In 1979 the colony count were about 30,000, there was a drastic decline in 1983, when there was a big El Niño. Now there are about 5,000. El Niño: Changes in the water temperature and winds around the Equator changes our area. With warm water temperatures, the upwelling that usually fuels the food web stops and the loss of nutrients kill off the prey and hence the predators.
But why, after the precipitous decline in that El Niño year, have Murres not recovered?
There are ten times as many nesting in Oregon; the increase we see in summer is an influx from Oregon.
Murres are vulnerable to bycatch. It can lead to pupulation decline, food web disruption, and ethical reasons – it’s a waste.
Fisheries gear that is risky includes nets. Birds get caught. Purse seiners can catch birds in the purse. Longliners have bait that catches birds as well as salmon. Trawlers catch birds in their cables.
The interaction depends on the birds’ foraging strategy. Murres and Puffins, Northern Fulmars will pick fish eggs and squids off the surface.
Here, we have coastal drift gillnet fisheries. WA tribal, non-tribal. BC. They have nets 1/2 km long, set for a couple hours at a time, day or night. Net size is 5 – 7 inches diagonally.
Are Common Murres vulnerable to this kind of fishing? Tatoosh Island is the closest breeding island to the fishing grounds. Gillnet bycatch studies show common murres and rhinoceros auklets being caught, 70% of them murres. Fisheries are in Barkley Sound, Willapa Bay, Juan de Fucka, Puget Sound. Nathalie decided to follow the birds using radio transmitters, since salvaged birds from fishing boats can’t be identified as to origin. For three summers, she followed them in a plane from AK to OR and into the Sound. The signal cones upwards, so the higher up the further the range. At 2,000 feet she could hear about 15 – 20 km. On the outer shore, higher up, she could hear 40 km.
Tatoosh has bats and humans but no other mammals. River otters occasionally come to eat eggs but sea otters don’t come on land. Bald Eagles are the main disturbance.
Before Aug 15, most of the birds hang around the breeding grounds. After Aug 15, they dispersed out from the island, most going east into the Puget Sound, overlapping where the gillnet fisheries are. 80% of Tatoosh birds overlapped fisheries, inshore August – September. About 4,000 murres were therefore vulnerable. But we don’t know what the death rate is. Studies from the mid-90’s show thousands of birds getting caught in the nets, about 2500. This is a substantial percentage of what is found on Tatooshn.
Fishermen take the birs out of the net and throw them overboard. The Kitsap Sun, reported one beach collected 200 birds. Necropsies looked for fluid in the lungs, lesions on the skins, showing that they drowned in nets. What to do? Shutting down gillnets is not being discussed, rather changing the gear.
Fisheries-caused beachings data was collected by volunteers. Beached Bird Survey of BC covers 87 beaches, COASST in WA covers 151 beaches. All those data go into a centralized data base. What are the species that show up and at what rate?
There were 18 fisheries-caused beachings in the last four decades, involving 2,347 birds, with 378 birds in the worst one at Boundary Bay, gleaned from a variety of data bases. The citizen science baseline surveys, 1991 of them, show that there are a maximum of 15 birds ever found at any beach. The mean for a fisheries disaster is 20 birds/km, for baseline is .07 birds/km. These occur during Aug and November with the peak in August, WHICH is when they migrate. Fishing season is June – December. Over 90% were Common murres, also cormorants, grebes, gulls, loons, etc, while in the baseline study they were not disproportionally represented.
Solution #1: Time of day closures, should save some Rhinoceros Auklets and Common Murres; they are caught more at dawn and dusk, possibly worse at night, esp. Western Grebes. Cons: fishers want to maximize their time. At midday they compete with purse seiners.
Solution #2: Modify the net by making it more visible to the birds. This reduces seabird bycatch by 50%, with no impact on the target fish catch. Cons: Cost, inconvenience.
Washington bycatch mitigation: Non tribal, adopted in 1999: To fish for sockeye, you need to fish during daytime with a white mesh net. Downside: Non tribal only, and sockeye are only a minor part of the fisheries.
Summary: The Murres from Tatoosh are vulnerable to fisheries. The problem persists despite the declining fisheries and the mitigation. Some fishermen are not interested in sharing bycatch data, since they are afraid of the fishery being shut down.
Keeping track of Seabirds with citizen science: Observe birds at colonies. Whidbey Island Pigeon Guilemot surveys: How many, where nesting, what eating? Guillemots, puffins, rhinoceros auklets all come to the surface, with a fish in their bill. With binoculars you can ID the fish. With Guilemots they’re gunnels, prickleback, greenlings, anything that lives in nearshore rocky bottoms. They hug the shores.
You can count birds from the coast. Seattle Audubon has just started a pilot project. Volunteers go to the same site every month with binoculars and count for a 1/2 hour.
You can count dead birds.
Monitoring: On colony, at sea.
It has been shown that one circuit of an island to look for tufted Puffin nests is sufficient to find them, using the proper protocol. Outer Coast, Protection, Smith, etc, have been done. Would want to do more than one year.
Winnie: moved here in ’77, on South end of Matia, Puffin Island, used to have puffins.
Glen: Someone should track forage fish population in the Puget Sound, what their densities are, do they correlate with the bird population?
Nathalie: The closest study is a scoter survey.
Peter: There’s herring surveys. There are short and limited forage fish surveys, but not comprehensive, even though they have commercial value. Seabirds can tell you a lot, as an upper trophic level. If you can sample the fish directly, you’re removing assumptions.
Glen: You look for the birds to tell you where the fish are. In ’96 there were thousands of seabirds on an unbelievable amount of sand lance, so many dogfish you could walk on them, in ’98, ’99, they were cleaned out. We didn’t see herring until ’04 or ’05. I think that’s what happened to the seabirds.
Peter: Given that you do beach seines, who knows where your fish monitoring is going to go?
Glen: Chinook drives it, we want to know it all. We can’t even buy the ethanol to preserve our data to save it for DNA.
Peter: You should find the right scientist match.
Nathalie: Collaboration is usual. Look to NOAA for forage fish.
Peter: Monitoring is only as good as the question that drives it. Think carefully about what you want to get out of the monitoring. Phenology – how variable is the timing?
Peter: Things are tuned to conditions. Richard Primack, conservation Biologist at Boston University, looks at climate change based on flowering plants in MA, going back to Thoreau’s journals of 153 species. That’s a 150 year data set. When do you first see pigeon guillemots? Try giving people a rationale and a checklist.
Hallie: You can see patterns from raw data collection.
Julie: Both and.
Peter: Ancillary data might lead to your second chapter of your dissertation. But at least generally, you already have an idea of what interests you. What do you want to know about seabirds? Think about what you want to know.
Seabird Workshop · 688 days ago by Julie Loyd
Ornithologists Nathalie Hamel (University of Washington) and Peter Hodrum (University of Puget Sound) will make presentations on their research on seabirds on April 26 at Loyds’. They may stay overnight so they can spend more time with folks that have a particular interest in starting data-gathering on seabirds. They should be there 11:00 am on Saturday April 26. Anne Beaudreau will try to come to help make introductions and suggest connections between seabirds and our existing efforts to understand plankton and salmon.
This will almost certainly not be Nathalie or Peter’s last visit to talk about, and look at seabirds. One goal of this trip is to see whether there’s enough interest to collaborate with Nathalie on some seabird research that complements the other studies we already have underway. Let’s use this opportunity to envision some new kinds of adventures with these young ornithologists…